Sputtering activity plagues reopened West Coast ports

Dockworkers may be back, but the job of moving cargo is slow going

Associated Press

Published Saturday, October 12, 2002

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Although dockworkers at 29 West Coast ports were back on the job moving cargo, they weren't always doing it fast enough to satisfy their employers, setting the stage for a potential court battle if things don't pick up quickly.

"We're certainly not where we wanted to be today," Pacific Maritime Association spokesman Steve Sugerman said Thursday, a day after thousands of longshoremen from San Diego to Seattle returned to work.

"We're hoping to see improvement tomorrow," he added.

If things don't pick up, the association that represents shipping lines and terminals could go to federal court and accuse the longshoremen of violating the terms of a return-to-work order a judge issued Tuesday at President Bush's request.

When the association locked out the dockworkers two weeks ago it accused them of deliberately staging a work slowdown after contract negotiations stalled amid disagreements over pensions, benefits and whether jobs created by new technology would be unionized.

They returned Wednesday night to docks cluttered with a mountainous backlog of cargo and, in some cases, discovered containers had been misplaced or equipment was not readily available to quickly move goods onto trucks and trains.

"Terminal operators don't even know where cargo is. They put trains everywhere they could. Containers are piled up on top of each other. It's a mess," complained Leal Sundet, an official with the local union chapter in Portland, Ore.

Truckers waiting to collect cargo at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation's largest port complex, faced a turnaround time of around five hours -- nearly double the norm, said Joe Nievez, president of Vernon-based Qwikway Trucking Co.

Some drivers kicked around a soccer ball as they waited in a 25-deep truck line at one pier where two cranes servicing three ships were unloading containers.

Nievez said it was too early to tell if the delay was caused by the flood of truckers who rushed to the terminals or by the dockworkers' pace.

Luis Umana, director of transportation for the Long Beach-based trucking firm Price Transfer Inc., said he didn't believe the delays were deliberate.

"The longshoremen may have people who didn't want to get involved in the picketing and are out of town," Umana said. "I'm hoping that by Friday everything should be back to normal when it comes to staffing the ports."

Officials at the 10,500-member International Longshore and Warehouse Union have promised to work as hard as they can without sacrificing safety.

Some ports reported things had returned to normal.

"They're getting the work done," said Mick Schultz, spokesman for the Port of Seattle. "The productivity level is good. The pace of the work here is good. It's at or very close to normal."

Even under ideal circumstances, it will take weeks to uncork the bottleneck in the domestic supply chain. Perishable cargos and military items have first priority, but then it will be a free-for-all among importers and exporters vying to get their products in motion during the always-congested holiday import season.

The 10-day lockout cost the economy up to $2 billion per day by some estimates.

In ordering it ended, U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco cited its impact on the fragile U.S. economy.

His order expires Wednesday, at which time he was to review the case and determine whether to extend it into an 80-day "cooling-off period" under the Taft-Hartley Act.

But the union and government lawyers said they had agreed Thursday to extend the order for the 80 days without returning to court.

There was no word, however, on whether the union and the maritime association had agreed to meet with a federal mediator to hash out the contract dispute that led to the lockout.